This has received an Oscar nomination for Best Short Film:

A Night at the Garden

I watched the short film that Trike had linked - food for thought.  I've noticed that nowadays some of the people who embrace the "Holohoax" rubbish come from America.  I heard the bit blaming the Jews controlling the publishing outlets - not everything changes in 80 years.

Triceratops wrote:

This has received an Oscar nomination for Best Short Film:

A Night at the Garden

Thank you very much for this film Triceratops.

I found the film back while searching for the American Nazi party,
but I found also the story, which seems a short living one...
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-american-bund
https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/1939-nazi-fascist-rally-chicago-history/Content?oid=21376284
Perhaps that is the core membership of those Fascist parties?
"The Nazi party's seizure of power breathed new life into the movement. In July 1933, the Friends of New Germany held its first convention in Chicago, with the grandiose goal of unifying the millions of German-Americans under its banner. The group was no less hostile to Jews or leftists than were its counterparts in Germany. The historian Sander A. Diamond has suggested that skilled workers left economically insecure by the Depression formed the core of its membership."

And read once the comments, those are the most interesting...the Trump defenders are not that far away...indeed very interesting to read the comments...
Will perhaps add an addendum to my thread of "Back to the Thirties"...

Kind regards from Paul.

I was going to leave this topic, but for some reason I can't.
 
If the horrific psychological burden borne by those children who survived the death camps is unimaginable, what of the  terrible legacy fate gave to those other survivors -  the childen of the Nazi war criminals?


Adolf Eichmann had four sons: Klaus, Horst, Dieter and Ricardo. Three apparently remained "loyal" to their father, but the youngest, Ricardo, who is still alive, has not.
 


In 1995, Ricardo Eichmann was interviewed by the Independent. Ricardo was born after the war, in 1955.


Ricardo Eichmann Speaks to The Independent


He pronounces his father's name as if he were talking of a stranger. "Adolf Eichmann," he says, "is a historical figure to me." But the historical figure left him with a disturbing legacy: a fatherless childhood, an adolescence filled with darkness and half-truths, and a lifetime label of "Eichmann's son".


Perhaps we can understand, if not condone, Magda Goebbels' decision to kill her children in the Vorbunker. She wrote this to her former sister-in-law a month before she allowed the "sweetened drink" to be given to her offspring:


"We have demanded monstrous things from the German people, treated other nations with pitiless cruelty. For this the victors will exact their full revenge...we can't let them think we are cowards. Everybody else has the right to live. We haven't got this right—we have forfeited it. I make myself responsible. I belonged. I believed in Hitler and for long enough in Joseph Goebbels...Suppose I remain alive, I should immediately be arrested and interrogated about Joseph. If I tell the truth I must reveal what sort of man he was—must describe all that happened behind the scenes. Then any respectable person would turn from me in disgust. It would be equally impossible to do the opposite—that is to defend what he has done, to justify him to his enemies, to speak up for him out of true conviction...That would go against my conscience. So you see, Ello, it would be quite impossible for me to go on living. We will take the children with us, they are too good, too lovely for the world which lies ahead. In the days to come Joseph will be regarded as one of the greatest criminals that Germany has ever produced. His children would hear that said daily, people would torment them, despise and humiliate them. They would have to bear the burden of his sins and vengeance would be wreaked on them... It has all happened before. You know how I told you at the time quite frankly what the Führer said in the Café Anast in Munich when he saw the little Jewish boy, you remember? That he would like to squash him flat like a bug on the wall...I couldn't believe it and thought it was just provocative talk. But he really did it later. It was all so unspeakably gruesome..."



PS The former partner of one of the Eichmann children described her spouse, Horst, Ricardo's brother, as a 'devout Nazi' and said he hung a swastika on the family house after his father was taken. "After Grandpa Eichmann was kidnapped, the family was in crisis: it was a very difficult time when he was in prison in Israel."
 
"Grandpa Eichmann" - I shuddered at that, as I did at  the expression "a difficult time".

llluminating posts, Temps. That letter came as a surprise - Magda's mind set as depicted then was not revealed thus - or am I wrong? - in the several  last days in the Bunker films. That her children would suffer, yes, but not that she was appalled by what she had been involved in. 
What the OT calls 'sins of the fathers' is ever with us and Ignatious (sp?) Loyola's well known quote of, 'Give me a child until he is seven then do with him what you will,' is still relevant. I am  chilled by memory of  several children born in north London from Nazi POW's married locally who had well formed opinion and attitudes - and biased war knowledge - by the age of seven. Where did that lead?

'What did you do in the war, daddy? was a bit of an ironical joke at the time. I only asked one person - a close friend in the RN- of this and he said 'Submarines.' Which was odd because he had  a leg missing from a road accident. Later from his Times Obit I learned that he was at Bletchley Park - hut six_ and  key to  plotting U boats. As was also his WREN wife and both had great influence in directing my young mind to applying questioning in serious study, I now realise.

Priscilla wrote:

  That letter came as a surprise - Magda's mind set as depicted then was not revealed thus - or am I wrong? - in the several  last days in the Bunker films. That her children would suffer, yes, but not that she was appalled by what she had been involved in.

I'm watching Downfall now: just got to the scenes with Magda. She tells the doctor that she cannot allow her children to live in a world "without National Socialism". As you say, little of remorse - the honest acceptance of moral responsibility. Will finish the film (not having a very cheery few days with all this) and then try to find out a little more.

Perhaps on a tangent, Temperance, but when you're mentioning Downfall in this context, I suppose you're referring to the German film from 2004, Der Untergang?

It's not the doctor Magda has just been speaking to: it's Albert Speer.

Yes, it's directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and stars Bruno Ganz. It is an excellent film - but I've not finished it yet.

Imho this film has been helping present days Germans coming to terms with what happened then, in a way that Japan and Austria still have not.
I'm much less certain about Italy, where a civil war was waged like in Greece just following liberation from Nazi-German occupation.

According to a research documentary shown on a 'small TV channel' some time ago, there are still areas in Spain where some people don't mix socially even within the same village, because of whom they are descended from. 
I suppose the present Spanish government's official decision to eradicate memorials of that Civil War and its aftermath may be called an attempt to re-write history - almost in Soviet fashion - and as such will create problems in years to come.

I've just finished the film which I have found very disturbing - I am trying to work out my own feelings at the moment. I won't comment further today - need a bit of a break from thinking about all this, but will try to find out more about about Magda Goebbels tomorrow. 

The portrait of her was not sympathetic.

When I lived in Germany I had the opportunity to talk to many people who had been children at the time, and in some cases children of medium to high ranking Nazi party members. I found that in Bayern, especially in smaller towns and villages, there wasn't the same reticence to discuss personal experiences from that period as existed elsewhere, and in fact I distinctly recall being taken aback by the number of what these days one might call "unreconstructed" people who not only were prepared to discuss quite openly and honestly their past but also express quite plausible (and often very personal) rationales behind events that conventional history books I had read simply hadn't prepared me for.

The more one spoke with these people the more one came to realise that a glib and simplistic notion of "everyone had been indoctrinated" and "now everyone was cured" simply didn't reflect the reality - even among people who superficially appeared to have shared a very common experience through their formative years as well as shared traumas as those years unfolded. How each individual came out of that experience and the view on life they held afterwards was by no means uniform at all.

In the town of Dachau, I remember, I got to know two good friends, then approaching middle age, who were running a small business together. One of them was the son of a local Gestapo officer and the other's father had survived twelve years in Dachau concentration camp, having been one of the first to be incarcerated there as a "communist" rounded up within weeks of Hitler coming to power. I met him too (several times - he was one of the most intelligent and humane people I have ever had the privilege to know), and was delighted that all three were always open and willing to discuss that period of history - which for them was something rather less easy to consign to past and to page than any new prevailing social ethos might demand of them - especially with a curious and naive Irishman like myself.

The bond of friendship between them was difficult to understand, at least from my perspective as an outsider. "Reconciliation", a word often united with "truth" to explain a process whereby societies overcome past division and internal conflict, didn't seem to play a role at all (though "truth" most certainly did). They were politically quite polar opposites, if maybe not quite to the extreme of their fathers there was certainly no mistaking whose son was who. Both of them however cited their mothers as one main reason that they could hold any type of moderate view at all, though not to the extent that either woman would have even behaved civilly to each other had they ever met, even after the war - quite the opposite in fact. In the case of the Nazi mother, who I also met, there was certainly an element of being rather more ready than her husband to see "the writing on the wall" as the conflict neared its end, and she had acted upon this in no small way to ensure that her two children would be as safe as could be in the circumstances. However the other advice she instilled in her children was to never forget the cause of National Socialism and to quietly bide their time until it could flower again, in doing so applying a retrospective filter of what was "good" and what had been "excessive" in what had been done in the name of that cause in the past (something that also fascinated me when talking to that generation - unlike their modern ultra right-wing equivalents these people rarely parroted the same justifications or definitions when rationalising their past, almost as if each individual had had to construct this defence alone and from within themselves, and in fact trusted nothing thereafter that didn't come from this deeply personal interrogation, quite the opposite in fact to the cartoon presumption of how an indoctrinated person might behave at all). The son was to only partly adopt her advice as he grew to maturity - unlike his sister who married young and settled into a cocooned domesticity, thereby retaining this received view well into adulthood, his own need to get out and about so he could pursue work and training meant that he increasingly saw such a view as largely irrelevant in the real world, at least to him as his own horizons broadened. And then of course once the sixties came around he, like many others of his age, immersed himself in a counter-culture that owed nothing to that whole chapter of history at all.

Within that counter-culture he met the other lad, and they became fast friends, though both acknowledged that their friendship would be severely strained if ever they attempted to prioritise discussion of their inherited political views, which they had both retained to a large extent, and for both of them one good reason not to overly question these views, or even abandon them, would be that it would almost certainly drive a wedge between them and their respective parents, who they both loved dearly. In that sense, for all their broadened outlook and life experience in a culture which ostensibly owed little or nothing to that which prevailed in darker times, they were still prisoners of that time at heart, and regarded this as a simple and inescapable fact of life - cause for neither regret, shame, nor even defiant pride, just something about them that "was" and would remain part of them until they died.

What intrigued me was this placing of a value on their friendship so far above other considerations, considerations which would normally be regarded as insurmountable within societies not coping with having to get past catastrophic trauma as such fundamental social division and the mutual hatred it engenders brings about for all within that society. But what amazed me immensely, even more than I was intrigued by his son's outlook, was the occasion I first met and spoke with the man who had survived Dachau, while a guest at his home in the company of his son's friend's mother (a meeting suggested and arranged by both the sons). She may not have been the most academically versed person in the world, and her support of her late husband's political views was unwavering (she acknowledged with affection and pride that she had learnt how to love the party through him) but she had an amazing recall of events, an absolute pragmatism that had probably saved her family's life and which she could explain in as much detail as one wished her to, all without remorse and while admitting fully how, when and why it had often contradicted her political ideology and how this had left her feeling at the time. And it was in fact in the discussion of principles being compromised and hidden reserves of strength found within one in extreme circumstances that he and she found the most common ground, and my presence was almost forgotten as they compared notes - nostalgically even - from the respective litanies of horror that had been their lives at one time. In fact I learnt afterwards that these two people had also become good friends over the years and in fact often met up to discuss "old times", especially as the number of people in the area who might fully appreciate their experiences through having shared that period began to dwindle.

I learnt a lot from these encounters - and not just historical information.

nordmann,

before leaving I want to react first to your thought provoking narrative. I read your message in the start of the evening and prepared in mind how to react, but at the end for the moment don't know exactly how.
As for the narrative I have had some similar circumstances, not that much from the left-wing side against the Fascists or from Belgian Jews (there was one I had in the inner circle (from Poland (family murdered in Poland in WWII), but he never ever has mentioned something and for the rest it was an intellectual and the same as us in behaviour, outside perhaps some more strict attitudes towards moral)
But I had more contact with children of the "Fascist" movements (yes that is a difference with the Germans) where many during WWII collaborated with the Germans (while yes, all the Germans were not Nazis).
Ages ago, I started a novel in the "I" form about a friend, who turned out to be a "homo" in the Catholic college (and saying nothing to his widow mother, we as youngsters at the start of WWII and he as a Fascist in the Waffen SS. I warning him for his homosexuality in a Nazi environment, but he didn't listen...read some letters from him from the East front and later no track of him anymore...and then half a novel seaking in Germany and other, but he had to have changed his name...finally finding the guy back in Germany under another name and he was lucky with another man...and then recapitulating the past...
no, nordmann, I have to think about a reaction, which will certainly not be the same as your excellent style and content
PS: man, nordmann, you were a bit everywhere in your life...

Kind regards from Paul.

Nordmann - several years ago I presumed to comment on the opening chapters of your work-in-progress, Xartis Psyxis: I  said back then that I believed your real literary talent is as an essayist. I stand by that view. You could be up there with the best of 'em: Chris Hitchens, Martin Amis, Gore Vidal. Marrtin Amis  once said of the American that, although he often disagreed with Vidal's views, it had to be admitted that "Essays are what he is good at ... [Vidal] is learned, funny, and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating."

This isn't a buttering-up: I mean it.

I also think your post above could be the basis for another excellent and thought-provoking documentary. Shame I am not a BBC producer.

I don't know whether to post this - perhaps this thread has run its course; and I am in any case still trying to work out what I really feel about several issues that the discussion has raised. My thinking, especially after this weekend, is very muddled and these are random thoughts.


I got back last night from a course at the Quaker Conference Centre in Birmingham. The course title  was apparently nothing to do with this topic, as it was  all about "Ego and the 12 Step Programme": we were looking at the work of the very interesting Franciscan priest, Father Richard Rohr. (I am not a Quaker, by the way, but was invited to attend by a friend who does belong to the movement and who is sympathetic to my various struggles with things). I was abashed when we read and discussed the following short paragraph from Rohr's  book, "Breathing Under Water". It  immediately reminded me of what Vizzer had said upthread - what I took as a "rebuke" - and it brought me up short: Rohr's  brief commentary on Step 4 me realise I must think more carefully about Vizzer's comments. Here is the paragraph:

 
Step 4
Make a fearless moral inventory of ourselves.


Step Four is about seeing your own "log" first, so you can stop blaming, accusing and denying, and thus displacing the problem. It is about seeing truthfully and fully...if you see rightly, the actions and behaviour will eventually take care of themselves. The game is over once we see clearly because evil succeeds only by disguising itself as good, necessary or helpful. No one consciously does "evil". The very fact that anyone can do stupid, cruel or destructive things shows they are at that moment unconscious and unaware. Think about that: evil proceeds from a lack of consciousness.


 
I've  also been wrestling with Hannah Arendt about this: did her comment about the "banality of evil" mean a similar thing - there is nothing so simple as demonic "evil", but only an unawareness - almost a kind of helplessness - within ourselves (the Jungian "shadow"? )? As a very "amateur" psychologist, I am terribly confused about this. Is it also what Christ meant by the plea, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do?" Or is this sentimental, bleeding heart nonsense?  Arendt referred to Eichmann's "shocking mediocrity" - his essential "stupidity" (she called him, I believe, a "clown") ? Arendt said it was not that Eichmann could not feel (she did not consider him to be a "psychopath"), but that he could not - or should that be (in Jungian terms) would not - think. He was quite unable to face - that is, think about - the truth about himself and his motivations; or those of his master(s) whose orders he claimed he had simply "obeyed".

EDIT: But then I'm thinking also of the famous comment about Shakespeare's most "evil" villain, Iago, whom Coleridge described as "a motiveless malignity". Is there such a thing, or are there always "motives", however deeply they may be buried in the psyche?

Evil may proceed from a lack of consciousness on the individual's part, but once it is underway in any manifestation it then prospers through collective lack of consciousness.

There was a very good example of this on BBC TV only a few days ago when a man who currently has apparent public licence to say even the most abhorrent things with little or no intelligent rebuke, many of which with other individuals would most certainly be taken as rather obvious indications of how evil may be manifest in at least the perceived persona as publicly displayed by that person, made a series of remarks (untruths, as it happens, but even that is less important than analysis of the probable motive behind them) that were actually quite apposite in the context of this thread.

BBC news - Rees Mogg

If one is looking for a clue as to why banality and evil can also so readily go hand-in-hand, study this man's tone of voice, adopted by him especially when uttering the most callous and false assertions as he engineers his immediate environment to achieve his ends.

This may not be evil on the scale of Hitler, or even Eichmann, but I am of no doubt regarding which family of rhetoric it belongs to.

Temperance and nordmann,

from all what I have heard and read of the Thirties by witnesses (mostly from an inner circle) and for instance these 14 reportages from Maurice De Wilde about the collaborators with life interviews (that I first want to see again) it is nearly as if I have lived during the Thirties.


The English automatic translation is not that well, the French is even worser. It wil be prehaps only Dirk, who will be able to see the 40 hours documentary...

But from what I remember from my readings and hearing and from these reportages, people became sucked in the "system" mostly by their own will, but many times by stupidity or lack of "sane" reasoning, but many came to it by reasoning as to avoid a Communist system that in their eyes was evil, but they didn't saw the evil of the Fascist system or didn't want to see it. And there were also a lot of people, who had not a personality on their own and wanted to be led without too much thinking. I'll come back to it when I have again seen the 40 hours documentaries.
Yes and most of the collaborators try to seek for apologies for how they came to what they did. And there are also ones, who flatly stick to what they have done without giving motivations. and without feeling guilty in whatever way...

And Temperance, to come back to your conference...perhaps it would be a good exercise to ask oneself: what would I have done in those circumstances?
Perhaps, when you speak about the banality of evil, when one looks in his own soul, one would perhaps be afraid, when one is honest with oneself, what lays hidden under the surface...Can a normal (but what is normal?)human, when gradually coming in given circumstances where there are no brakes of a normal (but again what is normal?) society anymore becoming a monster? Perhaps many can become a monster under given circumstances? That would not say that once a society becomes again "normal" that the perpetrators don't have to be punished for their deeds.

Preliminary thoughts, perhaps more in a forthnight...

Kind regards from Paul.

Temperance,


I have now seen three of the 14 Belgian collaborator films that I mentioned in  my previous message and I came essentially to it as I was thinking about the story that nordmann told about his encounters during his time in Germany. But I now think that there are perhaps two discussions. The one of the behaviour of "normal" people in the war and about the adepts of Fascism and Communism and the one: how ordinary people can become monsters during "certain" circumstances. and I think, if I understood you well, you as me (since years) are struggling with that question? Is there not in each person a kind of brake in the mind which prevents that? Out of a feeling of solidarity with an equal human being as we ourselves are?

Up to now in the documentaries, even as they stuck after the war and their punishment to their former "beliefs", from their testimonies to the Belgian journalist they seem all "normal" people...
Although the German army supported the "Einsatzgruppen", who started with the, as the French call it, the Holocqust par balles...and it can be that some Belgian collaborators, who were nearly all "Eastfronters" helped also in this genocide...And up to the third episode Maurice De Wilde never asked them about that item...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen

The killings took place with the knowledge and support of the German Army in the east.^[144] On 10 October 1941 Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau drafted an order to be read to the German Sixth Army on the Eastern Front. Now known as the Severity Order, it read in part:

Quote :

The most important objective of this campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete destruction of its sources of power and the extermination of the Asiatic influence in European civilization ... In this eastern theatre, the soldier is not only a man fighting in accordance with the rules of the art of war, but also the ruthless standard bearer of a national conception ... For this reason the soldier must learn fully to appreciate the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry.^[145]

Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt of Army Group South expressed his "complete agreement" with the order. He sent out a circular to the generals under his command urging them to release their own versions and to impress upon their troops the need to exterminate the Jews.^[146] General Erich von Manstein, in an order to his troops on 20 November, stated that "the Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated once and for all."^[144] Manstein sent a letter to Einsatzgruppe D commanding officer Ohlendorf complaining that it was unfair that the SS was keeping all of the murdered Jews' wristwatches for themselves instead of sharing with the army.^[147]
Beyond this trivial complaint, the Army and the Einsatzgruppen worked closely and effectively. On 6 July 1941 Einsatzkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C reported that "Armed forces surprisingly welcome hostility against the Jews".^[148] Few complaints about the killings were ever raised by Wehrmacht officers.^[149] On 8 September, Einsatzgruppe D reported that relations with the German Army were "excellent".^[148] In the same month, Stahlecker of Einsatzgruppe A wrote that Army Group North had been exemplary in co-operating with the exterminations and that relations with the 4th Panzer Army, commanded by General Erich Hoepner, were "very close, almost cordial".^[150] In the south, the Romanian Army worked closely with Einsatzgruppe D to massacre Ukrainian Jews,^[110] killing around 26,000 Jews in the Odessa massacre.^[151] The German historian Peter Longerich thinks it probable that the Wehrmacht, along with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), incited the Lviv pogroms, during which 8,500 to 9,000 Jews were killed by the native population and Einsatzgruppe C in July 1941.^[152] Moreover, most people on the home front in Germany had some idea of the massacres being committed by the Einsatzgruppen.^[153] British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper noted that although Himmler had forbidden photographs of the killings, it was common for both the men of the Einsatzgruppen and for bystanders to take pictures to send to their loved ones, which he felt suggested widespread approval of the massacres.^[154]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnungspolizei#Police_Battalions


There is also a book mentioned that a member is reading on the French Passion Histoire that I try to have more information about:
"Heydrich et la Solution finale" by:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89douard_Husson
https://www.amazon.com/Heydrich-solution-finale-Edouard-Husson/dp/2262017840

And some comments in French about the book from another French history forum Hérodotote
https://www.herodote.net/La_Solution_finale_decryptee_a_travers_son_architecte-article-484.php


Tomorrow more about the book and about the génocide question and how ordinary people...

Kind regards from Paul.

Looking today to the news I was struck by a lady with child who escaped with the family from the last enclave of IS. So called civilians. She said that she want to still fight for IS if she has the opportunity. It are perhaps the most fanatic ones, who remain overthere, but it remembers me about the testimonies of the Nazi collaborators that I have seen in the first three episodes of the De Wilde documentary. Obviously they still believe in the "Sake" and if the circumstances are again the same, they would do it again. No one of them seem to see how they were lurked into it all and how non logical it all was. I don't say that the implementation of Communism into the society was that logical too.
Dirk, while I see you overhere...if you are interested in the famous documentaries of Maurice De Wilde about the collaboaration in WWII in Belgium. Here they are...I guess more than 40 hours long, but in Dutch...a lot is also in French and German with Dutch subtitles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhd-0N3kuXo


And at noon seeing the news I saw an interview with the Communists in the wake of the Belgian and European elections.  For them it is all that easy and logical. Give it from the rich to the poor, so that they can live decently. When the reporter asked, who would pay that spending for the poor?  He answered a tax on the rich fortunes and the big earners. But although I agree to some degree about solidarity, there has to be in my opinion some kind of compensation as for instance for the doctors, who have done that much to have their degree and apply their skills for the good of the community. A fair! compensation I agree, but more than some low-tech technician? Otherwise we end in a Communist dictatorship as in Cuba? Or as in Britain and more and more in Belgium too a doctor for the poor and the rich have better doctors but they have to pay much more for it. But perhaps in the Communist system there will be no rich anymore? And on economic base, which is altered by political decisions, Belgium stays not alone in the world, and each decision on social level has influence on economic level, so until there is coordination on world level Belgium has to look for any change to its neighbours, otherwise the economic actors will perhaps move to a third country? The step by step method is the one that the social minded center parties are trying to implement, but they are seen as boring. The Communist, as the Right national slogans are more exiting and I wonder if the "grand public" is reasoning enough to understand how it all works. Of course there is always a solution for the problems of extremists: a Right wing or Left wing dictatorship...

Kind regards from Paul.

Paul - it is true that I wrestle with all this. I believe Hannah Arendt did too: this great philosopher and teacher was still struggling to make sense of the "problem of evil" until the very end of her life. If such an intelligent woman felt she had failed to understand - as have so many other exceptional thinkers - the rest of us have little chance of geting to grips with these things.  But one keeps trying...

This Guardian article and Eichmann's last letter may be of interest:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/28/adolf-eichmann-final-message-architects-holocaust-evil



People say it all begins in childhood - which brings us back to Priscilla'a original question about how children survive after exposure to terrible things - the horror and violence and trauma of man's inhumanity to man. What is baffling is that most children so exposed do not grow up to be inhuman monsters: certainly they they may be disturbed, many seriously so, living with depression and addiction throughout their lives, but they still have the capacity for love and empathy. It is the others, those who, like so many of the Nazi war criminals, have apparently had a "normal" - often a solid and "respectable" - upbringing, who grow up to be capable, apparently inexplicably so, of the most dreadful crimes. It seems to me it is exposure to genuine parental love - however fleeting that love proves to be, and even if received from parents whom society would deem "bad" parents - such love stays with a child throughout life, even if fate later puts the child in the most appalling, even hellish, situations. What happens in the very early years of life mark a child for life, as the famous Jesuit - with unconscious irony - remarked. Excessively harsh and unloving parental (especially paternal) disciplne - or, ironically, lack of loving discipline (overindulgence and failure to impose any reasonable boundaries at all) - combined with parental (especially maternal) rejection - conscious or unconscious - seems to do the real damage: add repressive, authoritarian religion (of whatever faith) to the mix, and we have a devil's brew indeed - a recipe for the breeding of inhuman fanatics...

I'm thinking here of Alice Miller's work on the authoritarian nature of child-raising in Germany (and elsewhere). Unquestioning obedience to the father was the norm in pre-war Germany. According to Miller, severe corporal punishment and routine humiliation of the child - the "for your own good"  theory of parental discipline - was considered to be ideal. Neither rod nor child was spared. But I wonder too about unconscious rejection by the mother: a mother can apparently be a "good" mother" while actually neglecting her child.


Alice Miller's work gives accounts of abused and silenced children who later become destructive to themselves and to others. Adolf Hitler, says Miller, was such a child. Constantly mistreated by his father, emotionally abandoned by his mother, he learned only cruelty; he learned to be obedient and to accept daily punishments with unquestioning compliance. After years, he took revenge. As an adult Hitler once said, "It gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware people are of what is really happening to them."  Shudder.

But of course nothing is ever so simple - as the account of a friend of Miller's shows. I apologise for the huge quotation, but perhaps it will be of interest to a few. I found it fascinating. Here is the opening:


http://screamsfromchildhood.com/war_trauma_alice_miller.html


This is the story of a friendship whose upsetting end taught me about war and genocide trauma in a shocking, utmost personal and painfully enlightening way. Alice Miller and I were unlikely friends: a Holocaust survivor — and a second generation German. Nonetheless, we were likely friends because we both were driven by a search for answers to the haunting question: how could the unspeakable crimes of World War II and the Holocaust happen. Alice Miller was 16 years old when World War II started; under the Nazi terror, she had to hide a Jewish identity from which she was estranged. As a Holocaust survivor, Alice was deeply motivated to find causes for the Holocaust — one of which she saw in the violent, authoritarian and inhumane methods of German child rearing. In "For Your Own Good," her second book, she unmasked these methods and also devoted a chapter to Hitler's childhood. For the first time, I read something about the Nazi horrors that deeply resonated with me.

Already before I read Alice Miller's books, I had raised my children differently than I had been brought up: without physical violence, trying my best to treat them respectfully and sincerely. When I read "For Your Own Good," Alice's brilliant unmasking of "black pedagogy" and her insightful, brave account of the effects of cruel parenting, I felt not only validated and supported in how I had treated my children, but also as if something I had always known deep inside connected with my conscious mind. Today, I would call this inner knowing a part: her thoughts had touched a part of me: an outraged part, filled with a passionate —NO— to my parents, —NO— to how they had treated me, and —NO— to how they had led their lives after the Holocaust and the war. This NO has guided my life in surprising and unexpected ways — years before I met it one day in a therapy session.

Through her books, Alice conveyed the message that childhood suffering affects our mental, emotional and physical health, and harms us and our lives. She inspired countless humans to raise their children without violence. I shared her passion to inform the public about the causes and effects of child abuse and neglect, so I supported her and worked with her, also for her website. I admired her for her activism on behalf of the rights and humanity of children. Today, physical punishment of children is outlawed in 39 nations around the world; Alice contributed to this development.

She also instilled hope that therapy was a way out of the prison of childhood and a tool for change. Trained as a psychoanalyst in Switzerland, Alice at first recommended in her books psychoanalysis as a helpful form of therapy. Her insights gave me hope that change was possible: Two years after I had read "For Your Own Good," I entered therapeutic work in Chicago in 1982 with a psychoanalyst, Allen Siegel, who felt close to and worked with the insights of Heinz Kohut. For our work, he searched for literature about second generation Germans, but he could not find anything. My encounter with him, a Jewish man, brought the Holocaust and Germany's history to the forefront of my thoughts and feelings. I was thirty-two years old.

Thirty-two years later, my therapeutic and life journey have come full circle as they have led me back, once again, into this harrowing time in a stunning way. In 2008, a painful break had ended my relationship with Alice, but I could not make sense of it — other than to detect that something was wrong and speak up about it on my website. What was wrong became clear only when I learned from Martin Miller what he had endured as Alice Miller's son. In shock, over and over again, I could only listen to him bit by bit; but with time, I grasped his significant insight how the traumas of genocide and war had impacted his mother. Appalled, in dismay and shock, my parts and I struggled to deal with Martin's revelations about his mother's abuse and her severe dissociation, also when I read his haunting book "The True Drama of the Gifted Child — The Tragedy of Alice Miller — How Repressed War Traumas Impact Families," which was published in Germany in the fall of 2013. Sadly, he has not yet found a US publisher.



Lionel Shriver's chilling novel, "We Need  to Talk About Kevin" comes to mind too. In this fictional study, a rejecting, but apparently "good"  mother is married to a weak father . They breed a monster. But the question always remains: was little Kevin a monster from conception, or did he become one? The old question is left open.

The German Government is still paying pensions to former SS members. Between 435 and 1275 Euros per month, contrast with the 50 Euros a month being paid to former Deportees and Forced Labourers.

Euronews SS Pensions

Triceratops wrote:

The German Government is still paying pensions to former SS members. Between 435 and 1275 Euros per month, contrast with the 50 Euros a month being paid to former Deportees and Forced Labourers.

Euronews SS Pensions

Triceratops,

some week ago after there was here in Belgium quite a fuss about it, I saw it on BBC World News. And there it was contradictory with the Belgian News. I set it in my favourites to mention it overhere, but as it was so quiet here on our forum I didn't mention the contradiction. But now I have erased it and don't find it back on the BBC. Were they aware of their mistake and have erased it too  ? All the news that I now find is conform with our Belgian original news, as your site and the other sites available now.
The original:
https://www.rtbf.be/info/belgique/detail_des-pensions-allemandes-toujours-versees-aux-collaborateurs-de-40-45-une-bien-longue-saga?id=10149452
And they spoke also about Britain and Spain
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3718851/The-Waffen-SS-living-Britain-Twenty-five-officers-drawing-pensions-UK-allowed-entry-Second-World-War.html
But contrary to Belgium it seems to be people from Ukrainian origin?
And also in The Netherlands where many were in the Waffen SS...
https://nltimes.nl/2019/02/20/34-dutch-getting-pensions-service-waffen-ss-report


And there are according to the RTBF already research and questions from 2012 on or was it 2008? Then there were still more then two thousand cases and if I recall it well they started after the war with some 17,000 cases (have to check it in the documentary)
And see already in 2016 the BBC reported:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36489700


Have they waited in the Belgian context till the Waffen SS members are nearly all dead till they start a serious reaction against Germany?
And as those pensions are not known to the Belgian government, the collaborators don't pay taxes on it, even for the German government the days in Belgian jail count as "working days" for the constitution of their pension...

Kind regards from Paul.

Temperance, I am so glad that you shared your thoughts with me. I will let it sink in a bit, before I reply in full. Too late this evening...read it earlier in the evening, but the whole evening reading about the coming of a national identity in the Southern Netherlands as discussed on Historum with a certain "motorbike" (one, two years ago) from the Spanish Netherlands on. Read now that under Empress Maria Theresia in the Austrian Netherlands they started with a curriculum of history: one general history a kind of "sacred history" started with Israel and the empires leading to the Christian European fulfillment and a "fatherlandish history" related to the Southern Netherlands and especially the Duchy of Brabant. And the odd thing, when I was in the Fifties in the "lower school" (6 to 12) we had still this division of "sacred history" and "national history"  

Kind regards from Paul.

Don't worry, Paul; you really do not have to feel obliged to "reply in full" to everything!!

My witterings above were not really suitable for a History site anyway - I seem to be psychobabbling more and more as I get older. I blame Brexit.

Temperance,

"My witterings above were not really suitable for a History site anyway - I seem to be psychobabbling more and more as I get older. I blame Brexit."

Not sure if your psychobabbling is not adequate (I wanted to say "geëigend", but see now that they in the dictionary translate it with: appropriate) for a history board?
I more and more seem to see that history is indeed a kind of play of psychology?...influencing and being influenced?...and this impression can be grown by getting older...because, with all the information of the inner circle and the broader circle and history writing on the Thirties (even but born in WWII), I see the nowadays events more in perspective? But perhaps such a discussion would be better located on "Political ideology"?
Temperance, if you, in your excellent English, or Priscilla, want to start something on a subforum in some at random sense, I am certainly "partie prenante" as they say in French.
And now I have difficulties to translate that in English. I feel with Cosmic Monster, if even this gives already difficulties...
On the web they translate with "stakeholder", while on my French board, as I understand it , the French use it more as "asking party, involved party, someone who has interest in it, I would also say in Dutch: vragende partij (asking party)...if someone knowing better English and French...?
I wanted to speak more about Steve Bannon and the American influence, the Russian influence with the French Le Pen and now seemingly the daughter of the spokesman of Putin, UKIP? Orban with both the American right and the Russians? Cambridge Analitica...
But yes this is perhaps for the new thread. Are the new political ideologies part of the advertisement world or methods?

Temperance, I hope that I don't appear too grumpy for you.

Kind regards, Paul.

And excuses to have made from our "Comic Monster" a "Cosmic Monster", I really had it all the time in that sense in the "mind"

PR

I don't think you are any more "grumpy" than the rest of us, Paul! We live in grumpy times.

Paul wrote:

Not sure if your psychobabbling is not adequate (I wanted to say "geëigend", but see now that they in the dictionary translate it with: appropriate) for a history board?
I more and more seem to see that history is indeed a kind of play of psychology?...influencing and being influenced?..

Well, yes indeed: to me history is so much about psychology -  that of the leaders and of the led. But (going wildly off topic here) that is, as I understand, inadmissable to most historians? Everything must be evidence based, and who can give "evidence" for the workings of a person's psyche? It is something Vizzer warned of earlier in this thread.

EDIT: Rest of post deleted as off-topic and irrelevant.

Apropos nothing except maybe Priscilla's original post here - two BBC radio programmes originally aired in 2015:

Lost Children of the Holocaust

Deleted.

Why did you deleted that poem, Temps? I thought it highly relevant to wonder   what influenced  the people who instigated and sustained the horrors of the holocaust. Did it begin in their childhood raising?
The poem was thought provoking.
 
The children mentioned in my original post shared in common a huge sense of loss of family as well as  all also recalling the memory  threads of love for family lost that they still clung to. And whilst writing this I have been jolted into wondering if that close family bonding is one of the issues that outsiders have always had with their race. I need to mull over this one now.

Priscilla wrote:

Why did you deleted that poem, Temps? I thought it highly relevant to wonder   what influenced  the people who instigated and sustained the horrors of the holocaust. Did it begin in their childhood raising?
The poem was thought provoking.
 
The children mentioned in my original post shared in common a huge sense of loss of family as well as  all also recalling the memory  threads of love for family lost that they still clung to. And whilst writing this I have been jolted into wondering if that close family bonding is one of the issues that outsiders have always had with their race. I need to mull over this one now.

Well, I'm glad you thought the poetry quotation and the references to family influences were vaguely relevant  to your OP; but it must be admitted the rest of my ramblings were not, hence their deletion. I detected the tiniest hint of censure (a (w)rapping of the knuckles) in the boss's  "Apropos nothing except maybe Priscilla's original post here..."). Probably reference to Jesus (poem) was bad enough, but the error was compounded by mentioning Diarmaid MacCulloch (psychological biography): those two in one post was really just too much. Also Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell have absolutely nothing to do with the topic.

Maybe we have all had too much of the heavy stuff - off to English Eccentrics now and a bit of a laugh.

Thanks for supportive comment though: one feels such a prat at times when one allows one's mullings and ramblings to get out of hand.

So  put the poem back. Let it be an epitaph to the thread.

Regards, P.

So  put the poem back. Let it be an epitaph to the thread.

Regards, P.

So  put the poem back. Let it be an epitaph to the thread.

Regards, P.

When thrice commanded, one cannot but obey.

Here's my brill Wiki quote from George William Russell (who was actually a bit of a nutter - mad Irish mystic):


In ancient shadows and twilights
Where childhood had strayed,
The world’s great sorrows were born
And its heroes were made.
In the lost boyhood of Judas
Christ was betrayed.

"Germinal" in Vale and Other Poems (1931)

R.I.P. this most interesting thread.